We couldn't do screening day reports without hearing from nurse Ali Chandra - here's what she posted on her blog Wednesday night.
4955: the number on the tiny slip of paper that the final patient handed to the nurse standing next to me in the gathering dark this evening. Four thousand nine hundred and fifty-five, and that's not counting the several thousand more who were turned away in the line that stretched up the street and back down the other side before they ever came through the gates or the ones who slipped in along with a family member and brought us their problems, too.
I'm exhausted in every way possible after screening more than three hundred of them from my position just inside the gates, but I need to write while it's all still fresh in my mind. There are thousands of stories to be told from today, hundreds I could tell you myself, but there's one I just can't stop thinking about.
It seemed like every other patient that came to me today was a child on his mother's back, limbs stiff with cerebral palsy. He doesn't walk. He doesn't speak. He doesn't straighten his legs. Every one of those mothers looked to me with hope written all over their faces, and one by one I had to tell every single one that there's nothing we can do.
I've been at screening days before. I've said yes and I've said no, but I've never done it knowing that the weight those words carry are so often measured against the warm mass of a child's body as it curls around your own.
One of those children was a little boy, just three years old. He clung tightly to his mama's shoulders while I spoke to her about his condition. As she started to understand what I was telling her, her eyes dropped to the ground, her voice reaching quietly towards me through the clamor all around us.
Are you a mama?
My stomach lurched as I shared that my baby girl is just two years younger than her son, and her head snapped up, eyes wild, daring me to answer her next question.
Would you leave her? If she was like this, would you leave her?
Her son's eyes, wide and dark and bottomless, stared back at me from behind her shoulder as she held my gaze, her heart laid bare in front of me.
I tried to picture Zoe like that, the polar opposite to everything she is, and I knew in that moment that I could never begin to understand the despair that drove that mama to ask me what she did. Because if it were Zoe who had been born into a body that just couldn't communicate with her brain, I'd have moved back on land, taken advantage of the myriad early intervention opportunities available, enrolled her in special classes and therapies and everything else that would be considered her right as a child born in North America. I wouldn't be waiting for five or ten or fourteen hours in line on a dusty street with seven thousand other people, nothing but the hope of being told there was help to keep me standing.
We stood there, separated by a few physical inches and a yawning universe of experience, and I realized that it was only at the most visceral level that she and I shared anything, that the part of a mama's soul that knows what it feels like to carry her heart in her ams was the single, slender thread that bridged the impossible gap between us.
No, I told her. No. I would not leave her. And you won't either. Because you love him, because this is not your fault, and because you are doing the very best for you boy.
She smiled then, a tired, half-defeated smile, as she retied the ends of the cloth that pressed her son to her back. We both knew that my words held no real weight, that we'd each go our own way after our brief interaction, that nothing would really change. She walked away towards the exit, and I called the next patient forward.
When I got back to the ship, Zoe and Phil met me in Reception. My baby ran into my arms, kissed me, and spent the next twenty minutes telling me all about her day in sweet, unintelligible baby babble. She's sleeping now, curled up in her crib while I listen for her cries, and somewhere in Pointe-Noire there's another mama keeping watch over her baby, searching her shattered heart for the strength to stay by his side.
All I can do is pray that she finds it, today and tomorrow and forever.
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